Just How Big is Amazon S3? Really Big (and Growing)

The size of the cloud just keeps growing – at least it does for Amazon.

The company announced late last week that at the end of the first quarter of 2012, there were 905 billion objects in Amazon S3 and that it routinely handles 650,000 requests per second for those objects – with occasional peaks far above that number.

Amazon S3's cloud growth is by all accounts phenomenal. Back in the fourth quarter of 2006, there were just 2.9 billion objects stored. That number had increased to 40 billion in the fourth quarter of 2008 and 262 billion in the fourth quarter of 2010. Just one year later, the total number of objects stored in Amazon S3 had skyrocketed to 762 billion.

Amazon indicated that the S3 object count continues to grow at a rapid clip even after they added object expiration and multi-object deletion at the end of the year. Every day, well over a billion objects are added via the S3 APIs, AWS Import/Export, the AWS Storage Gateway, all sorts of backup tools, and through Direct Connect pipes.